Some simple web design fundamentals for a business website
Posted by Jennifer Farley | April 30, 2007
Let’s take a look at some of the things you need to consider when building a website for your business. The fundamentals of successful website building include; making your site load quickly, making it easy to navigate and of course making it look professional. There are many tools available to help you get there but is it necessary to use all every bell and whistle on your site?Firstly, you may feel that using a lot of animated web graphics, flash, banners and pictures on your home page will lead to extra interest from your visitor. It won’t. All it will do is slow down the loading time extensively. People surfing on the web are incredibly impatient and if your site does not load in less than 5 seconds, the will go elsewhere. All graphics should be optimized for quality and file size before uploading to your website.
Next, you need to think about navigation. People need to know “where am I”, “where will this button take me?” and “how do I get back?” The visitor should only need to look at their screen to see where they are at all times. Navigation bars should be clear and easy to read and in the same place on every page. The visitor on your page is not interested in working out a puzzle to find out where they are. Keeping pages clean, tidy and clutter free will result in an easier and more pleasant user-experience for your visitor.
Finally, the “professional” looking website does not include distracting backgrounds, loud and annoying background music or font sizes that shout at your visitor in two inch tall capital letters.
Backgrounds should not clash with the text on the page. Choose a single colour for the background and a complementary font colour that is clear and easy to read on the background. Avoid red and yellow text for the main body of the text. They are too hard on the eyes and will leave your visitor drained rather than excited about your products. The actually copy itself should be well written and brief – again web surfers are an impatient lot and don’t want to read several paragraphs where one paragraph will suffice.
To sum up, if your web pages are easy to read, clutter free, easy to navigate and don’t take long to download or make your eyes water, then you’re probably doing okay. Check out other websites to get some ideas and look at other business and product web sites (in your own field AND outside this fields) to see what they have done.
A well designed and thought-out website is the first step to producing a very good income.
Photoshop Resources : Photoshop Mosaic
Posted by Jennifer | April 27, 2007
Photoshop Mosaic is a new site dedicated to Photoshop tutorials, brushes, plugins and lots more. It has tons of great links to all things Photoshop. I found some brushes there that I really like. You can check it out here.
Photoshop : Tutorial - Using the Metallic Gradients
Posted by Jennifer | April 24, 2007
You’re probably well aware of the “regular” gradients that come with Photoshop but did you know that there are lots of other gradients that come with the program that are just waiting for you to load them up. In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add extra gradients into the Gradient Picker and how to make a super quick “silver” pipe.
1. Open a new RGB document, 300 x 300 pixels.
2. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool 
from the toolbox and draw a long skinny rectangle, similar to the one I’ve drawn below.
In the toolbar, select the Gradient Tool 
.
3. On the tool options bar, click on the down triangle next to the Gradient thumbnail to open up the Gradient Picker. In the right-corner, click on the triangle to open up the Gradient Picker pop-up menu. At the bottom of the menu you’ll see a list of all the other gradients that come as presets with Photoshop. Cool or what?
4. Choose Metals from the list . Photoshop will ask you if you want to replace your current gradients with the new set or if you want to append (or add) them to your current set. I usually choose Append.
5. Now that the new gradients are added, you can run your mouse over them and you will see that they have names such as Silver, Gold, Brass, Steel Blue and so on.
6. To make the Silver pipe, choose the Silver gradient , then using the gradient tool, click and drag from one side of the rectangular marquee to the other.
7. Ta Da! You now should have one nice looking “silver” pipe, made literally in seconds. Press Ctrl + D (Windows) or Cmd + D (Mac) to deselect the new pipe.
As well as the “metallic” gradients there are quite a few more to choose from so take a look at those ones too.
Design News : Kate Moss - The Font
Posted by Jennifer | April 20, 2007
Some of you font lovers may be interested (or horrified) to hear that Kate Moss now has a new brand. Created in conjunction with typographer Paul Barnes, it looks like this:
You can read more about Brand Moss here on creative review.
Photoshop Quick Tip: How come my Colour Picker looks funny?
Posted by Jennifer | April 19, 2007
This morning one of my trainees was having a problem with the Colour Picker in Photoshop. Normally, when you click on the Foreground or Background Colour Swatch (at the bottom of the Toolbox) it looks like this:
However, this morning it seems like the Photoshop elves had been at the whiskey and the colour picker looked like this instead:
If this happens to you, you can get your normal Photoshop colour picker pop-up back by pressing Ctrl + K (Windows) or Cmd + K (Mac) to open up the General Preferences dialog box. To make sure you get the one you want, under the Color Picker pop-up menu, set the chosen Picker to “Adobe.”
Photoshop : Tutorial - Using "Lock Transparent Pixels"
Posted by Jennifer | April 17, 2007
Changing the colour of an object that is semi-transparent or has faded edges in Photoshop is easy when you know how. In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button on the layers palette to do just that.
Let’s start off with a yellow blob. As you can see from the image below, it is definitely yellow in the middle but then it starts to fade out at the edges.
If you try to use the Paint Bucket tool on this faded edge, you will just end up with a circle with very rough edges, as seen below.
To get over this problem, click on the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button near the top of the layers palette in Photoshop.
Note that you cannot use this on the background layer only on layers with transparency.
By locking the transparent pixels, we can now only manipulate the opaque areas of the layer.
Now when I use the Paint Bucket on the yellow blob, the fade is preserved.
Obviously this is a very simple example, but as you can imagine this would be extremely useful when you are designing things like t-shirts or print work where you may need to change an objects fade colour.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
